But if post-truth really is as shiny, disruptive and new as Apple's newest iThing, what the hell are we supposed to make of this, from Ronald Reagan, testifying about Iran-Contra back in 1987, when Mark Zuckerberg was still in pre-school and Netscape Navigator, the world's first commercial web browser, was still seven years in the future?

As the good folk at RationalWiki have argued, this was every bit as as slippery as Bill Clinton's "I did not have sex with that woman" but way more serious, given that Reagan was talking, not about everyday marital infidelity, but about treasonously supplying heavy weapons to a hostile foreign power that was financing terrorism, in order to finance more terrorism. So we can push the history of consequence-free post-truthism back about three decades. But probably not four, given that Nixon wasn't able to escape the consequences once the truth about Watergate got out.

What changed between the fall of Tricky Dicky and the rise of Ronnie Ray Gun? I don't know for sure, but it certainly wasn't social media, which hadn't even been invented back then.

If I had to guess what went wrong, I'd be thinking about the perfection of modern media manipulation techniques, along with the debasement of mainstream journalism into the poor relation of public relations. I might be wrong, but I'm probably not quite as wrong as the mainstream journalists who try to pin the blame for this trend - which started before dial-up modems went mainstream - on the rise of the Twitterstorm.

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About this blog

Andrew King

No yearly round robin letter from me - just a blog about anything odd, entertaining, surprising or interesting enough to share with friends, family and other sentient lifeforms.

Also contains witterings about politics, society and the economy (mainly from the socially liberal/left quadrant of the political compass), along with a bit of marvelling in stunned disbelief at religion and other odd belief systems.